Drier and drier

Domenic Ciraulo, psychiatry chair and psychiatrist-in-chief at Boston Medical Center,
believes that both alcohol dependence and independence are associated with the brain's frontal lobe -- the region that governs self control.

He aims to prove that medications targeting this area can help alcoholics in their battle with the bottle, especially when combined with short-term therapy. Ciraulo's facility is currently recruiting for a study examining the efficacy of two antiseizure drugs, zonisamide and levetiracetam.

Ciraulo's program and its research are described in the current issue of Bostonia magazine.

If you live in or around Boston and would like to participate in the study, click here.

A melatonin link?

In a decades-old study (1981) of light-deprived hamsters and ethanol, those given daily injections of melatonin consumed less alcohol than those not receiving the injections. Hamsters treated with melatonin also drank less liquid overall. The reason, researchers speculated, was that the pineal gland may influence liquid consumption and thus, indirectly, alcohol consumption.

The yoga cure

Can yoga squelch the urge to drink? Considering its potential for significant physical, mental, and emotional transformation, one would imagine so.

Because there's yoga and there's yoga -- the few little stretches we do to stay limber versus total immersion in its practices.

It's the latter that's emphasized in Yoga Blog – Yogam Sharanam. Here, Swami Muktananda Saraswati offers the yogic solution to alcoholism. It includes, among other things, the purging of mental constipation.

While this post (based on a 1981 talk in Switzerland) might initially baffle the uninitiated, you can piece it all together by clicking around the site.

If you're unfamiliar with yoga and want an easier place to start, here's a good site for beginners.

This is news?

This week's big news was that people who are highly stressed not only drink, but have a harder time kicking the habit.

Researchers at the University of Liverpool found (surprise!) that alcoholics have higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol. For those who have stopped drinking, high cortisol levels make it harder to stay sober.

On a related note, cortisol can also make you fat, whether or not you drink. So besides the fructose, the super-sized portions, the bacon cheeseburgers, and our increasingly sedentary lifestyle, stress is also to blame for the obesity epidemic.

So how do you reduce cortisol? Diet, exercise, meditation ... and a nice long vacation on a tropical beach. But maybe without the pina colada.

A link between impulse and addiction?

Is the inability to control one's impulses what leads to drink? If so, a discovery by researchers at Queen's University in Ontario could lead to yet another route for treating alcoholism.

According to a university press release, a team led by neuroscience Ph.D student Scott Hayton has identified the part of the brain (the medial prefrontal cortex, or mPFC) governing imulsive behavior and the ways in which such behavior is learned. In addition to having an impact on the diagnosis and treatment of alcoholism, these findings, recently published in The Journal of Neuroscience, could also lead to therapies for other disorders and addictions.

The sugar/alcohol connection

Booze, as you may or may not know, is just another form of sugar. Talk to any sugar addict, and he/she will describe the struggle to quit, and how even a bite of a cookie leads to an all-night binge.

Of course, you can't get a DUI after consuming a bag of M&Ms, although Twinkies have been linked with violent crime.

But sugar, according to researchers, is as bad for your liver as that glass of pino grigio. Robert Lustig, a California endocrinologist who's recently published a number of papers on the topic, claims that not only is sugar addictive, it can also lead to such disorders as fatty liver disease.

Hence the obesity epidemic -- a compromised liver makes it even harder to lose weight.

Visit science cafeat the University of California, San Francisco, for the high-fructose scoop.

On a related note, check out this article, published several years ago in Psychology Today, linking a sweet tooth to alcoholism.

Blast from the past

Here's an interesting nugget I just happened upon: a 48-year-old paper from the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease on the use of Nialamide in the treatment of alcoholism.

There's a fair amount of information provided in the article's first page, at least enough to whet one's appetite. To read the full text of the article, you or your organization must subscribe to the journal, or you've got to buy it.

FYI, Nialamide is a type of antidepressant known as Monoamine oxidase inhibitor.